An Act of Violence

Right now, all the Hindi NEWS channels have a new scoop. They are busy talking about a particular Auto-Rickshaw Driver in Mumbai, who doused a traffic cop with kerosene and then set fire to him.

While the act is hideous & violent, one can imagine the anger of the auto-rickshaw driver. It almost smells of the cumulative angst of the entire auto-rickshaw driver community who continuously get harassed by these traffic cops for the smallest of their follies. Having travelled in auto-rickshaws, I myself have been witness to these unwarranted acts of harassment on couple of occasions.

In the auto-rickshaw driver community, this particular driver will probably become a hero. But, my fear is that cop-harassment instances will increase as a repercussion of this one incident. And that’s the inherent problem with any act of violence. It gets into a mindless loop.

ps: The cop is in the hospital recovering with 50% burns and the auto-rickshaw driver is the police-station, hopefully not getting beaten up.